by Thomas Laird
‘Unknown at this juncture. Wish I had better news, but the truth is what we’ve told you.’
‘And we’ve got four fresh corpses on the West Side.’
He surprised me by bringing them up.
‘It’s Abu Riad,’ I told him.
The Captain groaned.
‘Ah shit, Jimmy. You’re not going down that road again, are you?’
‘I tried not to. I tried to keep it local, with the bangers who did Beaumont and Ransom. But it’d be a lie if I let go, Captain. He’s behind it. He’s the mastermind.’
‘You’re not letting something personal get involved in all this West Side stuff, are you?’
‘Sure it’s personal. He was responsible for Celia Dacy and her son Andres, and he fucking got away with it. How’s it not supposed to be personal?’
‘Then we take the two of you off that case. Stick to The Count.’
‘I don’t think it’s necessary. We’ll do Abu Riad by the numbers, Captain. I won’t let my own feelings about the prick get in the way of a clean collar. I give you my word.’
The Captain studied me with his intense green eyes.
All right. I’m going to remember you said all that and you better remember you said all that too. Will you keep an eye on the senior investigator, Jack?’
‘He’s a big boy,’ Jack said.
The Captain eyeballed my partner.
‘Okay, yeah. I’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘Go out and get the bad guys, then,’ the Captain concluded.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Madelyn Meaney’s great-aunt wanted to talk to me in DesPlaines, a western suburb. The second vic’s relative was one of the few who attended the funeral. Jack and I were in attendance as well because it was standard procedure to be on hand at an unsolved murder’s burial ceremony. Sometimes perpetrators liked to show up and join in on the misery. There was that kind of cruelty in them. It was like a second opportunity to feed on the grief they’d caused.
We checked out the people at Madelyn’s funeral, but no one stood out as a possibility.
Jack and I drove to the DesPlaines location on a Friday morning around 10:30. Mrs Dianna Meagher lived alone in a brick ranch home. Tasteful from the outside — no lawn ornaments. You know, the deer or the little black coachman that irritated African-Americans. The usual vulgar shit. We pulled into Mrs Meagher’s driveway, and then Jack and I headed for her door. Wendkos rang her bell, but it took her some time to respond because she was eighty-seven and fully arthritic. So fully arthritic that she had to use two canes. I was surprised she didn’t employ one of those geezer, omnipresent walkers.
She invited us in. Her hair was silver and she was bent at the waist from what time had accomplished against her, but her eyes were violet and reminded you of someone much younger.
She instructed us to sit, and we did, on the sofa opposite from the white loveseat she lowered herself onto.
‘What can we do for you, Mrs Meagher?’ I asked.
It was pronounced Ma-her, I’d found out at Madelyn’s funeral.
‘I found something odd at my great-niece’s grave. I visited Madelyn just the other day.’
‘Something odd?’ Jack repeated.
‘This.’
She handed me a piece of rolled up, parchment-like paper. It must have been a standard sized piece of expensive typing paper that people used to use for correspondence before computers took over. I think they called it ‘onion skin’.
I unrolled it. On it was typed verse:
The soul shall find itself alone
’Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone —
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
‘Do you have any clue what this might mean, or who might’ve written it?’ I asked the old woman with the sparking, stunning violet eyes.
‘Not a clue, Lieutenant. Not a hint,’ the great-aunt of Madelyn Meaney told us. ‘But there isn’t a signature. And that was what disturbed me,’ she continued. ‘I remember you explained to me, Lieutenant Parisi, that murderers frequently go to the funerals of their victims. I just thought this might have come from the monster who killed Madelyn.’
‘It’s a possibility, yes,’ I told her. ‘We’ll certainly look into it right away.’
She offered us coffee, we refused, and the old girl looked relieved at getting rid of the two of us and the mysterious verse that someone had laid on her great-niece’s final resting plot.
*
The call from Jennifer Petersen’s first cousin came the same afternoon that we returned from Mrs Meagher’s DesPlaines address. The first cousin — Renee Dumont — lived in Hickory Hills, a southwestern suburb. She’d been difficult to locate. Petersen had no living mother and father, and most of the rest of her clan resided on the East Coast. There were even fewer attendees at Jennifer’s ritual than there were at Madelyn Meaney’s. It was very sad — just a few friends of Ms Dumont’s and a couple of homicide investigators.
We pulled into the Hickory Hills driveway at about 4:40 p.m. that same day. We were invited in, and the cousin, who was a large, big boned woman in her middle thirties, showed us a nearly identical piece of rolled up onion skin that bore yet another mysterious verse:
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness — for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee — and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still
The large-bodied woman, cousin of Jennifer Petersen, had no explanation for the poetry, either. She, like Mrs Meagher, had found the parchment paper underneath a single yellow rose.
*
‘Don’t look at me. I flunked poetry,’ Jack laughed as we drove back to the Loop.
‘You don’t think I’m an expert on this aesthetic shit, do you?’ I asked the junior partner.
‘How about the good Doctor? How about Harold Gibron, PhD?’ Jack smiled.
*
We drove out to Palatine after our shift was far gone. We were on our own time, then. Doc lived in a burb, but he was supposed to reside in the city, as old city employees on the force were compelled to do. So Doc used his mother’s address on the north side instead of his own, but he was never worried about getting caught and being canned from the CPD. He had that lofty PhD to fall back on, he kept reminding me. My partner never once called in sick since he returned from the leave of absence when the two young black girls were shot to death in a drive-by.
I never called in sick, but I had had a few leaves of absence over my career. But my mailing address was in the city proper, so I was in the clear from that out-of-city rap.
It was too cold on this early February day to sit on Doc’s back deck, as I had the last time I visited my partner. We sat in his cheery living room, a fireplace fully employed at this moment with a blazing fire. The flames leapt upward at Doc’s apparently effective chimney.
He gave us each the obligatory exotic beer from his collection of micro-brews, and then I handed him the two rolled up sheets of poetry.
Doc never even blinked or needed a moment.
‘It’s Edgar Allan Poe. “Spirits of the Dead”.
Some of his better stuff. Hard to believe the same guy wrote that piece of shit “Raven”.’
‘Yeah. Hard to believe,’ I replied, my jaw still dropped open at his speed at solving the mysteries of these poems’ source.
‘What the hell do you suppose I did to get that degree, Jimmy P? You think I balled my female profs, eh? We read all kinds of stuff. Poe’s lyric poetry included. He might have made a great poet if he’d stuck to lyrical only.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
Jack was as awed as I was. But Jack was awed by most everything Doc Gibron pulled out of his ass to remind you of the true enigma this man had always been. A Homicide with a doctor’s degree in Literature. How many of those rare avis do you suppose manned the police
forces in this country or any other country?
‘You think I’m making it up? Let me find a collection of his verse.’
We followed him down to his gorgeous, oak-panelled basement. It was his library. And there were enough volumes to supply a real library on Doc’s walls. Most of it was fiction. Doc had published stories in literary magazines. I could understand none of his tales, but I could tell they were intellectual pieces. He was working on his novel. He was always working on his future great tome that would surely free him from the burden of being a homicide copper.
He went immediately to a shelf on the left-hand side of the wall behind his wet bar, and he withdrew a volume bound in leather. Doc didn’t go in for paperbacks.
‘Here. Have a look,’ he told us. He handed the volume of Poe to me.
‘I don’t like this, Doctor,’ I told him after I perused the two pages that contained ‘Spirits of the Dead’.
‘You didn’t even read the damn thing,’ he cracked. ‘I know because I would’ve seen your lips moving.’
‘No. I don’t mean that.’
I handed the Poe book to Jack.
‘I’m not talking about the quality. I’m referring to the number of verses,’ I said.
‘What about them?’ Wendkos asked.
I looked at Doc carefully.
‘There are five verses. The first two victims of The Count each received their own stanza or whatever. That means he’s figuring on doing at least three more.’
Jack handed the Poe back to Doc Gibron, and then our senior colleague returned the collection back to its resting spot on the shelf.
*
‘The son of a bitch doesn’t seem that literate,’ I protested at Garvin’s.
John Garvin had returned from his kidney laser surgery. It was as if MacArthur had waded back onto the Philippine Islands in World War II. But we both knew Garvin was a veteran of the European Theatre with General Patton. The barman had been severely wounded at the Battle of the Bulge.
‘Why? Because he’s not formally educated?’ Jack asked.
‘Yeah. You heard what that teacher said at the St Charles Reformatory.’
‘Maybe he thinks poetry will help him collect women,’ Jack added.
‘It could very well be. All we’ve heard about him is about his survival skills. He knows how to fit in, and the group he’s fitting in with lately are our pasty-faced friends.’
‘The Goths,’ Jack said.
‘Where does he find them? He doesn’t frequent the bars they go to all that often. He must be hooking up with them somewhere else if he’s been accepted into their merry little society or cult or whatever the hell they consider themselves to be.’
‘Let’s try the Internet. We found The Farmer that way,’ Jack suggested. ‘Maybe he’s cybering with these lovely, overly-white white girls on the ether.’
*
We put Computer Services to work once again. I was computer ignorant and Jack was barely more conversant with the machines than I was.
Wally Garrity was our resident guru. We kept these young men for a while, and then we usually lost them to big companies about the time these youngsters were ready to marry and have little computer geeks of their own.
Wally was short and gangly. Looked like an ex-high school flyweight wrestler. He was lean, not bulky. That’s why I would’ve pictured him at the lower weights. He said something about winning the City Championship at his weight his senior year in secondary, so that was why I connected wrestling to him. He had the slight stoop that all jocks seemed to be cursed with. ‘They like to meet in chatrooms.’
Wally had helped us find the crazy priest-psychiatrist who murdered women by trying to ‘re-birth’ them by wrapping them in plastic wrap. We’d found Dr Null over the Internet, just as we’d made first contact with The Farmer via the cybernetics.
‘Just like most other disconnected sods,’ Wally smiled and said with a phony Brit accent. He was a big fan of R.D. Wingfield and the Inspector Jack Frost series of mysteries. I didn’t read many mysteries, myself. I liked stories that didn’t take any brains at all to figure out. Natalie was always taking me to chick flicks and was constantly amazed that I didn’t bitch about going.
‘It could take some time, Lieutenant.’
It was Wally’s stock disclaimer.
I gave him a copy of the first two stanzas of Poe’s ‘Spirits of the Dead’.
‘Ewww. A cryptic message from our boy, no?’
‘They were left on the two graves of his first two vics,’ Jack told him.
‘There are three more stanzas, Wally. Quit fucking around and find him,’ I said.
Wally coloured and his scrawny frame tightened up.
‘Just fucking with you, Wally,’ I smiled.
‘I never know with you, Lieutenant. You shoulda been a poker player.’
‘What makes you think I’m not?’ I smiled again. Then Jack and I left him to his state of the art machinery.
‘Happy hunting,’ Jack wished him.
*
‘He has a stiffy for Poe,’ I told my wife.
Natalie was doing sit-ups on the floor next to our bed. She was labouring, so I thought I’d talk her out of continuing.
‘No. I’m fine ... go on,’ she huffed as she started stomach crunches. Her left elbow to her right knee, and then her right elbow to her left knee. She was still struggling, but it was a no-win argument with the Redhead.
‘He left a stanza for each of the first two.’
‘Yeah? Maybe you ought to start hanging out at coffee houses. Aren’t these Goths the new Beatniks? Sort of?’ She grunted and went back to the exercises.
*
I checked out the newspapers. We hadn’t heard from Wally in two days. I found a number of listings for open mike evenings at the big book chains, but I couldn’t picture Maxim Samsa showing up at such a well-attended and public venue. I figured him for a much more low-key kind of setup.
There were bookstores that catered to those who didn’t fit what Doc called the mainstream. These were bookstores that sold way out kinds of literature. Doc called them the ‘zines crew’. And they had very selective interests. The occult was one such specific ‘interest’. I found three listings in the Tribune Sunday book section that I thought might be possibilities for Samsa and his friends.
I also did some research on Edgar Allan Poe at the downtown library. I read some fragments from biographers about him and found out that he went to West Point and then left because of some petty gambling debts his stepfather would not pay. I read that he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, and that she would’ve been considered jailbait these days — Mr Poe might’ve gone up for statutory rape if not for an incest rap ...
But what interested me most was what the biographers claimed was a constant theme in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe — the death of a young woman. Nothing seemed to fit all Poe’s aesthetic concerns as much as the demise of a young female. Nothing was more melancholy, more sorrowful, and it showed up in his poems time and again.
Our man Samsa had already done two young women. Now he was taunting me with his literary messages or whatever they were. I was convinced Maxim Samsa had left those two scrolls for me. He knew they’d end up with me eventually.
He was telling me his shop was still open and he was ready to do business. He was challenging me to come find him. The old movie cliché: ‘Stop me before I kill again!’ Cliché or not, his message was received.
There were still three stanzas remaining in ‘Spirits of the Dead’. He was letting me know that there were three more sad chapters to finish in his personal poem. Three more attractive young females were going to die slowly. Their lives would be drained from them in a more than deliberate fashion via The Count’s needle.
No, Samsa surely wasn’t going to disappear. He felt invulnerable, like a drunken teenager behind the wheel just before that final heart-stopping crash that he never saw coming.
I was going to meet him in that lethal intersectio
n before he could count to three.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I had been to therapy sessions before, but they had always been for me. Going to therapy with one of your own children was a far different experience. I had a lump that was wedged in my throat on the ride over to the therapist’s office, and I hoped my voice wouldn’t betray what I felt when we arrived.
Michael was in control. It never appeared as if he were on the verge of some emotional breakdown. He wasn’t a weeper. None of the members of my family — except for the two female toddlers — were criers. There would be tears from time to time, but no one in our family enjoyed bursting through with the waterworks. It seemed like cheap theatrics to me, but I never queried Natalie or Kelly about how they felt about emotional outbursts accompanied by raging waves of teardrops. If Natalie and Kelly wept, they never did it in front of me. Certainly Michael hadn’t burst forth since he was a very little boy. As I said, my son seemed very tough. Not the type for public displays or outward rants.
The doctor’s name was Dan Jenkins. Natalie knew him from some referrals that had been made when she was in uniform. His office was in Evergreen Park, a Southwestern suburb. The office wasn’t lush. It was more military-looking — what you’d call Spartan. No extras. No ginchy prints on his walls. Just a plain green wallpaper. This guy didn’t spend any money on overhead, apparently.
We sat in leather chairs. Comfortable, but not something you’d kick back and go to sleep in.
‘We’re having this session, Mr Parisi, because Michael wanted you here.’
I looked over at my ever-growing-taller son. He was truly a handsome young man. He must have got the looks from his mother Erin, because I was much shorter and much more olive-complected. He was already getting too many calls from girls. There weren’t any females at his high school, but they had a sister Catholic high school four blocks away from the all-male secondary Mike attended. He wasn’t much of a talker. I heard him mumble a lot as I passed him on the blower in the hall between our kitchen and living room. We weren’t going to put a phone in his room because we’d done that with his sister Kelly, and then we had never seen her for weeks while she burned the hours on her telephone. Not to mention the horrific bills she piled up on the blower.
